TheCantique

2014-03-29

Recently on Facebook pursuant to a conversation about alternative cancer treatments, I was inspired to wax eloquent on the topic of whether there will ever be medical-level evidence for my practice, Eden Energy Medicine (EEM). Here follows the blip that got me going and my thoughts that clearly have needed expression for some time!

> [MD's are] brainwashed and believe [chemo and massive surgeries for cancer are] the only solution. If it's the only solution, what alternative is there to offering it? That's how they rationalize the horror of pumping poison into a child.

This is a very uncharitable reading. Doctors are good, rational people. I agree with John Allison, "99% of all people want to make the world a better place." It is true that Vitamin C therapy has been vilified, but hasn't every treatment? All treatments should be heartily discussed and debated. Bring on the criticism, please. Also, let us not denigrate pills and surgery, which are indeed terrific, amazing tools and in many cases and have clear, immediately obvious and astoundingly good results for specific problems. It's natural that people want more of such a great thing that appears to cost so little in time from the client.

As best I can tell, the deeper reason that MD's support more conventional particular therapies rather than complementary/alternatives is simply because they agree with the modern research criteria of evidence.

Let us first consider what is -not- considered evidence. From there, we may consider how, without such non-evidence, will complementary/alternative therapies like TCM or EEM ever be considered to produce such evidence.

I focus on my discipline, EEM (Eden Energy Medicine), which has a large base of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) composing a good chunk of its theory. I am a certified practitioner and I personally think it is so amazing that I'm committed to sharing it with as many people as I can. I am also an Objectivist who thinks reality and evidence is of the utmost importance. Becoming acquainted with EEM was quite an eye opener for me, as it turned upside down a number of my cherished beliefs, but that story shall be for another day.

An example of non-evidence according to the current medical model (I'll shorthand it to 'evidence') is personal experience. If 100 people uniformly feel better after treatment X, that is not evidence. All those good results together do not constitute evidence but rather are considered hearsay. "The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data", as the Skeptical Medicine website touts. evidence is when all 100 people were 'controlled' to have the 'same' condition at the input of the study, the 'same' treatment during the study, and the 'same' output measurement results afterwards, which should be better than a group of similars who did not get the treatment under scrutiny. I use scare quotes because people differ so significantly among themselves and also it is probably impossible to fully control for all these factors.

The scientific evidence view has a corollary that bars even more data that is prevalent within EEM. It is that if people's improvements came in different ways, there is no 'evidence'. Thus if two clients both improve in the EEM measure of "less blocked energies", but their physical symptoms improve very differently, this is not considered evidence. Only if the outcome measure is already itself verified by prior 'evidence' or it is merely perceptual, only then is the outcome category considered valid for grouping results.

Explicit in this view is a statement that some good outcomes are ruled as irrelevant: if the effect is on the controls, this is considered a placebo effect and meaningless. Interestingly, the controls in modern studies do often improve. In fact the controls have been improving more and more each year, which has made it even harder and even more expensive to do drug-approval research. In some cases, the placebo effect, ie the improvement of the controls, has been 30% and the treatment in question only improves upon that by 5%. Such a difference, if statistically significant, is considered positive evidence for the treatment. I wonder if people's learning about EEM and other therapies has helped improve the placebo.

A third part of the scientific evidence view that should be noted is its lack of focus on side-effects and costs to the clients. Study authors are focused on the results of a treatment on a particular outcome. Other outcomes are generally assumed to be insignificant, even when clients may not consider them so. For example, even the FDA recently agreed to put a warning on Prozac to indicate that even though it is prescribed for depression, it relate to increased suicidal and homocidal thoughts. On another scale, increased cost is another risk to clients but not to study authors. Neither of these two factors are generally considered in the outcome criteria.

TCM and my discipline, EEM (Eden Energy Medicine), do not currently have much, if any, 'evidence' of the scientifically-approved type as described. Honestly, I am not sure if we ever will.

There are numerous significant reasons for the lack. One is that EEM is not patented nor patentable; so for any one company to do the research to prove its value would yield too little income to justify its enormous costs.

A second reason is that the EEM methods involve significant manual human labor and, naturally, people try to minimize human labor - we try to conserve expensive resources, and people are especially costly in the USA. In China, for example, there are more studies of TCM.

The third and fourth reasons, possibly the most significant ones, for the lack of evidence for EEM is a larger time delay and more difficult protocol compliance.

With regard to delays in results, EEM, in stark contrast to pills and surgery, often shows its results not in the next hour but the next day after treatment. This delayed effect compounds the problem of gathering evidence by at least a factor of ten because so many confounding factors can occur between the 'treatment' and the 'result'. A day or two is a long time. For example, if I give you a session and your sleep improves, who is to say that your sleep that night wouldn't have been better on its own? Maybe you had a great date with your spouse after our session and that led to an amazing sleep. All we really know as a scientific fact is that if your sleep is better, your body will be better off. How much? We don't know.

Protocol compliance is an issue in two ways: follow up work is necessary and yet because it requires significantly more time and education than taking a pill, it is sometimes harder to achieve. Differences in self-care or follow-up care may easily muddy any evidence for EEM. People understand that pills wear off - taking a single solitary pill is acknowledged to be insufficient. EEM has no pills, but the necessity for repeated work is similar. EEM is a practice of tests like dousing plus exercises similar to Tai Chi. Paying the time and money for one EEM session is very rarely enough to effect a complete result and significantly more personal investment is required to see its dividends than conventional medicine. This required longer-term protocol would make studies of it even more prohibitively expensive.

Those are some of the problems with doing research for 'evidence' on EEM.

For myself, though I am a researcher by training and by inclination, I no longer seek scientific quality 'evidence' for EEM. The significant difficulties of researching complementary/alternative care over conventional pills/surgery give it a much lower return on my personal investment. Instead, my focus is on sharing my knowledge and helping to educate as many people as possible to help themselves.

I am extremely convinced that there is real, solid, but unconventional evidence for EEM.

On my own body, I have done many accidental A/B experiments. Sometimes I feel out of sorts and I don't do EEM's tests and exercises. Other times I feel out of sorts and do them. The downtime I need to get back to productive work is reliably better by at least a factor of ten when I do EEM. One of my biggest problems is forgetting to do them enough! So I'm completely satisfied that it works great for me.

As a practitioner, I want objective results for my clients. How do I get that given the dearth of 'evidence'? I focus on education. Qua educator I care most about two things: my clients' thinking skills and their self-reports. Everything else will follow.

First, in accepting people for EEM sessions, I know my job is education - it is not medical care and it is certainly not medical diagnosis. I train people to better notice, better manage, and better multiply their own bodies' positive energies. As an educator, my top concern is that my clients think for themselves and selfishly care about their self-improvement. Independence and self-motivation puts a natural priority on noticing improvements. This part of EEM work is easy. One great perk to working with the alternative/complementary medicine crowd is that most of them love to think for themselves. They may be right or may be wrong, but either way I applaud their independence and spunk to live their lives "My Way."

As a consequence of clients' independence and goal-directed living, EEM is truly a natural complementary self-care. It is a helpful adjunct to whatever other treatments the client deems personally important. For example, my teacher, Donna Eden, has several incredible stories of how her work greatly aided recoveries from major surgeries and intensive hospitalizations.

My second concern as an educator in self-care is to ensure that my clients leave having perceptually felt a positive shift in their energies. Such a shift is usually highly motivational because the effort is usually very small. I help them by testing, asking them to feel the test results, and offering corrections for energies that need help. Once people feel the benefits of EEM in their bodies, then, depending on their context, they may be interested in furthering their education and training to help themselves even more. Their self-report reflections plus my observation can start that happy cycle.

In conclusion, the evidence for EEM is at the perceptual level, but it often takes training to perceive it because this is a Subtle Medicine. My EEM clients always leave feeling at least a little better than when they arrived and they usually want more EEM. I consider that evidence of success and EEM's efficacy.

2014-03-28

Hello! If you came from my Windows 8.1 Phone Store app, my privacy policy is currently very simple, as below. I plan to change it in the future as the app develops more features.

This first early beta of the application does not share personal
information with third parties nor does it store any information about
you.
This privacy policy is subject to change without notice
and was last updated on 2014-03-28. If you have any questions feel free
to contact me through Blogger.

//Update 12.50a Saturday my micro app was approved by the store! It has a ways to go before I consider it a MVP (Minimally Viable Product), but it took me through the whole workflow, which is a Devops best practice.

For example, the 'new' Python classes are identified by extra verbiage. Even though every class in Python inherits from Object, one must specifically specify that for classes that have no other parent.

Similarly, "self" is used all over the place, ie as the first argument of many methods, in order to specifically designate methods that are part of a class. Formally, a procedure in a class is a method, and a procedure outside a class and merely in the file module itself is called a function. So each and every method must have 'self' as its first parameter. It's easy to remember, since of course those same methods will be called with self.xx. Note that the caller does not repeat the word 'self' in the argument list it passes.

2013-09-13

I am acutely conscious of how desperately my posts need further work and thinking. I did and do wish to get started writing something, but until I judge many of the somethings worthy of an audience I will not be telling too many people about my little blog! For now, to help me find the posts most desperately in need of edits, I have added two kinds of labels.

Label: grade-A, grade-F, etc mean my score of how good the article is.
Label: dated means that this article has little or no permanent value.
Label: []TODO would like to add something that differentiates trivial but useful content, eg recipes, from ideas which hopefully are more long-lasting, or quips which may be reused.
[]Vitally related to that is the goal to enable [me] to subscribe only to a channel within, or to see them sorted that way.

[x]BLOG-TIP: Time zone fixed by using Toronto time.
Today it is
2013.0913Fri.15:16::11 , and the post was noon submitted for the book.
https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/41963?hl=en

Eben Alexander MD wrote a book describing his experience in 'the afterlife' while medically in a coma. It is titled "Proof of Heaven," [1] but cannot be and is not. There can be no such proof of a universe constructed solely within one's head, thus arbitrary to others.
Based on the medical and science training of Dr. Alexander, I was hoping to read discussion of how mystic experiences do and do not relate to evidence. Unfortunately, he merely describes his experiences; tells his related conclusions; and claims his religious ideas are now validated by his mystical experience. That tale is as old as time.

As people know, I have had 'mystical' experiences, for lack of a better word, and yet they are not 'mystical' to me - they are facts of reality as I know it. I have not made them up. In that, Dr. Alexander and I agree. However, being that each of our experiences are not of this world, ie the 'evidence' is all within our own heads, our experiences are not objective nor can they ever be. We can do our best to explain and share them, but they cannot be proven to others.

This book supported my view that what we experience within mysticism is at least partially related to our own background. We use our knowledge to discuss our findings, so he uses religious terminology to describe things that I would describe without it.

My goal is for religionists and mystics to recognize that we do not all perceive the same things in our own heads, thus we must exert the effort to speak cross-culturally. What knowledge spans across all religions, across all time, and is valid for all men? Only such a philosophy, ie Objectivism, does so and can thus be the basis for respecting rights in society. The reason Objectivism succeeds is because it is based on objective reality that we all do know and share. Objectivism is atheist, apart from faith and religion, so it is amenable to true proof and thus is the only proper philosophy on which to base a government. Already in the USA, many people implicitly accept the idea that government does properly separate church and state.

Unfortunately this book adds neither new evidence nor cross-cultural explanations of the NDE or mystic phenomena. It is strictly a Christian religious account of one man’s life during his coma. It does not attempt to discuss how non-Christians or atheists would view his experiences. Its audience appears to be Christians who already think there is proof of heaven and enjoy more stories upholding their faith.

How does the author fail to prove that the “physiological origins [of a NDE] could lead them to be really perceived although not lived in the reality" [2]? Taken at random, by flipping through the pages, here are two specific examples of how he refutes his own argument. First, on pg. 120 he appears to admit that he came back from his coma with "an ICU psychosis." By definition, psychoses are a "loss of contact with reality" [3], thus any/all objective credibility of what he said about his experiences while in the coma are destroyed. Secondly, in the final summary, he wrote on pg.170, "....[My NDE, Near-death Experience] had healed my fragmented soul. It let me know that I had always been loved.... And it had done so while placing my physical body into a state that, by medical science's current terms, should have made it impossible for me to have experienced anything." In science, lots of things appear impossible until they are understood. In this case, current science surely does not say that the lack of brain activity at time A necessitates never having a ‘dream’ regarding time A. Science never tries to prove a negative.

Thank you to the author for engaging in an interesting, controversial topic. Let us hope we will hear non-denominational discussion from him in the future. Perhaps he is a candidate to read a free copy of Atlas Shrugged [4]?

Refs;
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Heaven-Neurosurgeons-Journey-Afterlife/dp/1451695195
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience
Introduction;
The experiences have been described in medical journals as having the characteristics of hallucinations, while parapsychologists, religious believers and a few scientists have pointed to them as evidence of an afterlife and mind-body dualism. According to the 2013 PLOS ONE article by Thonnard et al., "near-death experiences cannot be considered as imagined event memories. On the contrary, their physiological origins could lead them to be really perceived although not lived in the reality."
[2A] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er
The Myth of Er legend concluding Plato's The Republic (380BC) may have been the first description of a NDE. A soldier appeared to be dead, yet ten days later he had not decomposed and arose from the funeral pyre.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis
[4] http://freeobjectivistbooks.org/

2012-10-20

An important goal of mine is to help the two wonderful sets of ideas I love, Objectivism and Energy Medicine (EEM), acknowledge each others' achievements. It is a tough sell to both sides!

David Feinstein aptly acknowledged the two sides. EEM practitioners, knowing the truth of their work in their results with clients, do not care about whether research does or does not prove them right. Regular science (in which I include Objectivism), on the other hand, sees no reason to care about a discipline whose actual metaphysics (perceptions) appears to have no basis in reality.

I sympathize with both sides, but not yet appreciated by either! I understand that, myself a few years ago would have dismissed the new me immediately. Today however, I read exciting news that a new book is coming out by a doctor whose EEM perceptions were documented simultaneously by medical technology. I will read it.
Anne

[]Newsweek advertises a new book on energy [my word] perceptions.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-doctor-s-experience-with-the-afterlife.html
I’m still a doctor, and still a man of science every bit as much as I
was before I had my experience. But on a deep level I’m very different
from the person I was before, because I’ve caught a glimpse of this
emerging picture of reality. And you can believe me when I tell you that
it will be worth every bit of the work it will take us, and those who
come after us, to get it right.

Suzanne Clegg 121019f> Some illnesses are much more dire in prognosis than cancer. Cancer cases can have spontaneous remission.
[]For consideration for her [blog]
http://www.spiritgate.com/

http://www.brucelipton.com/
Front page 121020s has a video with the briefest introduction: the idea that cells differentiate because of their environment, not their genes; blood is the environment and it is controlled by one's thoughts.

http://energyresearch.homestead.com/about.html
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/04/29/james-oschman-on-earthing.aspxHow Grounding Affects Your Blood
Another very important discovery, and one of the most recent, is that
grounding thins your blood, making it less viscous. This discovery can
have a profound impact on cardiovascular disease, which is now the
number one killer in the world. Virtually every aspect of cardiovascular
disease has been correlated with elevated blood viscosity. Dr. Sinatra
has been coaching Dr. Oschman's team in how to measure blood viscosity
using a method called zeta potential. It measures the potential on your
red blood cells by determining how fast they migrate in an electrical
field.

2011-01-29

Here is a cross-post from my comment to a delightful written debate on the merits of chia, a food I have been eating for well over two years. I'm disappointed that the Paleo gentleman touts flax seed over chia seed. I have personally experienced problems with flax and none with chia. Neither of them are suitable for DHA supplementation imho. I think chia’s greatest benefit is as fiber. I have two servings per day of the following.

//Update 2012-1020: Amazing Grass changed their product for the worse by adding stevia/etc and fortunately reversed their decision recently and stamped the new tins "You have good taste"!

Recipe: “Chocolate Tapioca Pudding”

8oz mug

2 scoops of Chia Seed (not milled/powder) (any kind seems fine. I like RenewLife's slightly best of all, but I normally buy on price, eg below)

2 scoops of Amazing Grass Chocolate Greens Powder

Add a small bit of water. Mix carefully to remove lumps. Gradually mix in more water to fill the 8oz container. Let stand 5 minutes for the chia to swell; stir again.

This recipe, imho, is safe for diabetic/hypoglycemic/oversensitive types such as myself a couple of years back when almost everything disagareed with me. Having this item as a “treat” (I couldn’t eat too much even of this) was something that saved my sanity! Here are urls for products I have bought;

Dr. Cordain of the Paleo diet challenges Dr. Coates to provide proof via studies that chia is healthy to consume. Although clinical studies are nice, why doesn’t the fact that the Aztecs raised it for years and venerated it count for anything? Wikipedia summarizes: “Folklore attests it was cultivated by the Aztec in pre-Columbian times, and was so valued that it was given as an annual tribute by the people to the rulers.[2][3]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_hispanica

Human studies of nutrition are notoriously difficult to do and control. The problem and also the benefit of food-based medicine like chia is that it is powerful yet subtle. To detect such subtle effects, imho, almost mandates collecting reams of data.

In the end, is it worth it? Chia is a food. Try it, maybe you’ll like it. Otherwise you spent $10, and in the USA we can all afford that risk. Also, if you don’t like it, be sure to give it to one of us afficionados!